#joan smith

“How I Spent My Summer Vacation”

The Founder (2016)

RIP. While I've read two of his novels—The Unbearable Lightness of Being toward the end of high school and Immortality toward the end of grad school—it was his theory of the novel, encountered mid-college, that moved and influenced me most. Two of the 13 paragraphs in the Times obit are devoted to misogyny in Kundera's fiction—that his prime accuser in the '80s is now a gender-critical feminist scourging the "narcissistic rage of trans activists" earns him no credit and perhaps should not—and for similar scrutiny of the way the word "Europe" functions in the book I am about to quote in memoriam, see here. To subject a novelist to an ideological trial on the day of his death—this might be emblematic of the totalitarian desire for religious certainty and political purity, for "apodictic and dogmatic discourse," to which Kundera opposed the ethical essence of the novel as a form committed to "inquiry."

As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning, Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world. To take, with Descartes, the thinking self as the basis of everything, and thus to face the universe alone, is to adopt an attitude that Hegel was right to call heroic. To take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters), to have as one's only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty, requires no less courage. What does Cervantes' great novel mean? Much has been written on the question. Some see in it a rationalist critique of Don Quixote's hazy idealism. Others see it as a celebration of that same idealism. Both interpretations are mistaken because they both seek at the novel's core not an inquiry but a moral position. Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language of relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse. They require that someone be right: either Anna Karenina is the victim of a narrow-minded tyrant, or Karenin is the victim of an immoral woman; either K. is an innocent man crushed by an unjust Court, or the Court represents divine justice and K. is guilty. This "either-or" encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge. This inability makes the novel's wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) hard to accept and understand.

Donna Noble walks into the cafe she rents out each week to host a bookclub for the ladies at work, she trails her hand across the countertop and picks out some custard creams, graciously provided by the cafe owner and sits down, eagerly waiting for her friends to arrive.

One by one they enter the large blue doors and squeeze around the table

“God Donna you couldn’t have found somewhere bigger?” One of the new members of the club asks

“You try finding somewhere for this price yeah?” she retorts, in a friendly, but mildly annoyed manner, urging them to settle down “right so as always, we‘ll go around and introduce the books we’ve been reading this week…”

She pauses briefly, the chatter in the room increasing the annoyance

“I’ll begin, get it out of the way”

“Err Donna”

“Yes Julie?” She said through gritted teeth

“Could I get a coffee before you start?”

“alright Julie”

“Me too actually”

“And me”

The orders started piling in, the cafe owner darting around with the pinpad and Donna, before mildly annoyed, now visibly frustrated, cut the babble with a

“RIGHT, I’m going to start now whether you like it or not.”

she begins describing her book, a gripping yet heartbreaking tale set in the Second World War. She slows down, her voice cracking

“You know my granddad fought in that war, never killed a man” she adds, a smile slowly appearing on her face. She looks down, visibly upset “He was a brave man, the best of them. Will always remember his nonsense quips about Aliens and space” she immediately grabs her head, it’s throbbing and she doesn’t know why, she panics for a second and then calms down, as if nothing happened. She attempts to continue but suddenly

“Here we go” comes a cheerful voice appearing from the kitchen, “got a mocha for you Angie, a cappuccino for you Sarah, oh some croissants for you mary, Theyre my favourite”

The coffees are getting served therefore the chatter begins again, so Donna, being the woman that she is, loudly clears her throat and continues her story

“He will always be in my heart, he uh” her eyes welling up, “passed a few days ago, funerals tomorrow”

Plates and mugs shattered, china and croissants all over the place.

The cafe owner stood there startled, apron stained with coffee, her blonde hair a frenzy

Donna looked up at her, concerned, “oh my god are you ok Joan?”

Joan responds solemnly, both of her hearts utterly broken.